Help! I have water flooding my basement

johnhoppeneDecember 20, 2012

So this summer I dug a 3' trench through my yard to lay some pipes in and I cut a hole into the side of my house so that the pipes could enter the house. We had some heavy rain two days ago and we noticed that our basement was flooding from that point. We think that when we dug the trench, it must have compacted the earth below where we were digging, and that is providing a nice platform for the water to sit on. When we dug a hole yesterday into the trench to the point where the pipes meet the wall (so see what we could find), we noticed that the ground was dry up until we hit water, which was more or less at the height of the hole in the wall. At the other end of the trench, when we dig down we get water to the same height. We think that there may be an underground stream feeding this end of the trench because the water level has not decreased at all even when water has come into our basement. Our two ideas to fix this problem are this: we will dig a french drain halfway along this trench out to a point that is (hopefully) below our 3' trench level and try to put concrete around the hole to seal it, or we will just take out the pipes, put some concrete down into the trench, seal the hole with concrete and lay the pipes at ground level. Our fear with the french drain is that we're actually just at the level of ground water and that the french drain would just allow more water to come into our trench. Does anyone have ideas about what we should do? We're in a bunch of water here. Thanks.